Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last decade:  in German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozen lesser places—­were not these horrible, too?  Mind you, there were for most of these wars no Red Cross funds.

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo?  What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley’s great dream of 1880.  Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the name of “the noble-minded men of several nations,” to introduce commerce and civilization.  What came of it?  “Rubber and murder, slavery in its worst form,” wrote Glave in 1895.

Harris declares that King Leopold’s regime meant the death of twelve million natives, “but what we who were behind the scenes felt most keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was desolation and murder in the larger sense.  The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people dumb with horror—­in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo tribes.”

Yet the fields of Belgium laughed, the cities were gay, art and science flourished; the groans that helped to nourish this civilization fell on deaf ears because the world round about was doing the same sort of thing elsewhere on its own account.

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said:  This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—­back of all culture,—­stripped and visible today.  This is where the world has arrived,—­these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted.  Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.

But may not the world cry back at us and ask:  “What better thing have you to show?  What have you done or would do better than this if you had today the world rule?  Paint with all riot of hateful colors the thin skin of European culture,—­is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia?”

It is.  Of this there is no doubt and never has been; but why is it better?  Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk?  It is not.  Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa.  Run the gamut, if you will, and let us have the Europeans who in sober truth over-match Nefertari, Mohammed, Rameses and Askia, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ.  If we could scan the calendar of thousands of lesser men, in like comparison, the result would be the same; but we cannot do this because of the deliberately educated ignorance of white schools by which they remember Napoleon and forget Sonni Ali.